How to Deploy PHP Applications to Linode with Nanobox

1 November 2017

PHP is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world, known for its flexibility and ease of use. Linode offers "lighting-quick" SSD servers, 24/7 support, and is an all-around simple, powerful, and reliable cloud provider.

In this article, I'm going to walk through deploying a PHP application to Linode using Nanobox. Nanobox uses Docker to build local development and staging environments, as well as scalable, highly-available production environments on Linode.

Download Nanobox

Setup Your Project

Whether you have an existing PHP project or are starting the scratch, the process of configuring it for Nanobox is the same.

Add a boxfile.yml

Nanobox uses the boxfile.yml to build and configure your app's environment both locally and in production. The most important setting in the boxfile is your engine. An engine is a set of scripts that build and prepare your app's runtime environment. Engines also expose configuration options unique to their specific language.

The PHP engine allows you to configure settings typically defined in your php.ini in the boxfile.yml, keeping all your environment configuration in one place. The full list of configurable options is available the PHP Settings guides.

Nanobox takes a minimalistic approach to runtimes, so a default PHP runtime comes with only the bare-bones requirements, including a short list of core PHP extensions. To enable PHP and Zend extensions, include them in your boxfile.yml. The full list of available extensions is available in the PHP & Zend Extensions guide.

What's required in your boxfile.yml depends on your application, but the following example shows a boxfile for a somewhat typical PHP application.

Go ahead and create a boxfile.yml tailored to the needs of your application and include it in the root of your project. If you're working with a framework, the Nanobox guides are a good resource for getting started. Otherwise you can view the PHP engine documentation or reach out in the Nanobox Slack channel.

Start the Local Dev Environment

With the boxfile.yml in place, you can fire up a virtualized local development environment. I recommend adding a DNS alias just so the app will be easier to access from a browser.

# Add a convenient way to access the app from a browser
nanobox dns add local myphpapp.local
# Start the dev environment
nanobox run

Nanobox will provision a local development environment, mount your local codebase into the VM, provision a containerized MySQL database, load your app's dependencies (if a composer.json is present), then drop you into a console inside the VM.

Update Your Database Connection

In this example, I'm using MySQL, but you can use any of the officially supported data services. When Nanobox spins up a data service, it generates environment variables for the necessary connection credentials. For MySQL, host, user, and password environment variables are provided. Also, Nanobox provides a default gonano database.

Update your database connection to use the auto-generated environment variables provided by Nanobox.

Adding Other Data Components

Note: The process for adding other data components such as Redis, Memcached, Postgres, etc. is the same:

Add the data component to your boxfile.yml.

Add the necessary PHP extensions.

Update your connection config to use the auto-generated environment variables.

nanobox build to apply the changes and provision the data component.

Run Your App Locally

Ok, you should be ready to fire your app up locally. Nanobox's PHP engine includes a php-server helper script that starts your app using settings defined in the boxfile.yml. For this example, it'll start Nginx and PHP-FPM. Just run the following from the root of your project in the Nanobox console:

Any changes to your codebase will be reflected in the running app. Once you're done hacking, exit out of the Nanobox console and your local dev environment will shutdown.

Prepare Your App for Production

While the boxfile.yml example above includes a web component and a storage component, it's important to understand that these do not get provisioned when running your app locally with nanobox run. In this environment, you start your web process manually inside of a local "code" container. Also, storage components aren't required when developing locally since everything is writable and nothing is distributed.

Network Storage vs Writable Directories

On the topic of writable permissions and network storage, something you should be particularly aware of when deploying PHP applications with Nanobox is the fact that deployed environments are read-only. network_dirs and writable_dirs allow you to change directory permissions in your live app, but it's important to understand the differences between the two.

In short, network directories are stored on a storage component and act as a shared filesystem for multi-node webs and workers that persist between deploys. They should be used for things that need to persist and/or must be consistent across all nodes in a cluster (like user uploads). Writable directories are stored on each node's local filesystem, so whatever is stored there isn't shared between nodes and will get flushed on deploy.

Production Start Commands

The php-server helper script is great for starting your PHP app locally, but it shouldn't be used to start your app in production. Using it in production will prevent the Nanobox process manager from properly tracking PHP-FPM and Nginx/Apache. The PHP engine provides three other helpers that should be used: start-php, start-apache, and start-nginx. Each of these start the appropriate processes individually, allowing them to be properly monitored by the process manager.

Add a New Provider to Your Nanobox Account

Name your provider and choose a default region. The name is arbitrary and only meant to help you identify it in your list of provider accounts.

Launch a New App

Go to the home page of your Nanobox dashboard and click the "Launch New App" button. Select your Linode provider from the dropdown and choose the region in which you'd like to deploy your app.

Confirm and click "Let's Go!" Nanobox will order a server on Linode under your account. When the server is up, Nanobox will provision platform components necessary for your app to run:

Load-Balancer: The public endpoint for your application. Routes and load-balances requests to web nodes.

Monitor: Monitors the health of your server(s) and application components.

Logger: Streams and stores your app's aggregated log stream.

Message Bus: Sends app information to the Nanobox dashboard.

Warehouse: Storage used for deploy packages, backups, etc.

Once all the platform components are provisioned and running, you're ready to deploy your app.

Stage Your App Locally

Nanobox provides "dry-run" functionality that simulates a full production deploy on your local machine. This step is optional, but recommended. If the app deploys successfully in a dry-run environment, it will work when deployed to your live environment.

Deploy

Add Your New App as a Remote

From the root of your project directory, add your newly created app as a remote.

nanobox remote add app-name

This connects your local codebase to your live app. More information about theremotecommand is available in the Nanobox Documentation.

Deploy to Your Live App

With your app added as a remote, you're ready to deploy.

nanobox deploy

Nanobox will compile and package your application code, send it up to your live app, provision all your app's components inside your live server, network everything together, and voila! Your app will be live on Linode.

Manage & Scale

Once your app is deployed, Nanobox makes it easy to manage and scale your production infrastructure. In your Nanobox dashboard you'll find health metrics for all your app's servers/containers. Your application logs are streamed in your dashboard and can be streamed using the Nanobox CLI.

Although every app starts out on a single server with containerized components, you can break components out into individual droplets and/or scalable clusters through the Nanobox dashboard. Nanobox handles the deep DevOps stuff so you don't have to. Enjoy!